B Company marched back to camp; Kennedy sought an audience with Captain Hughes. He could only say in a husky whisper: “I want to explain about Corporal Wheeler’s poncho.” He had to stop for a fit of coughing; the captain bent down and looked at him sharply. “He took off his poncho and made me put it on—I’d forgotten mine. I hope it won’t count against him.” “What do you mean by staying on duty in this condition?” demanded the captain. “I sound worse than I am.” The captain grunted. “Report at sick call tomorrow. I’ll remember what you say about Wheeler. Goodnight!” The next morning, when Kennedy returned from the hospital tent, having been pronounced fit to continue on active duty, he found the members of squad five congratulating Wheeler on his promotion to the rank of sergeant. “Here’s the fellow that saved the job for me.” Wheeler clapped Kennedy’s shoulder. “Captain Hughes said you went to him and told tales out of school.” Kennedy looked pleased. “I heard the captain tell you that you mightn’t be good at looking after your men,” he answered. “I thought I’d show him.” “Business, just business,” said Wheeler with a twinkle in his eyes. “Dad would never forgive me if I let anything happen to you. I feel just as responsible for the bank, having you up here, as he does. Now come and I’ll give you another lesson in how to tie a knot.” —Arthur Stanwood Pier. VII—THE PATH OF GLORY I It was so poor a place—a bitten-off morsel “at the beyond end of nowhere”—that when a February gale came driving down out of a steel sky and shut up the little lane road and covered the house with snow a passer-by might have mistaken it all, peeping through its icy fleece, for just a huddle of the brown bowlders so common to the country thereabouts. And even when there was no snow it was as bad—worse, almost, Luke thought. When everything else went brave and young with new greenery; when the alders were laced with the yellow haze of leaf bud, and the brooks got out of prison again, and arbutus and violet and buttercup went through their rotation of bloom up in the rock pastures and maple bush—the farm buildings seemed only the bleaker and barer. That forlorn unpainted little house, with its sagging blinds! It squatted there through the year like a one-eyed beggar without a friend—lost in its venerable white-beard winters, or contemplating an untidy welter of rusty farm machinery through the summers. When Luke brought his one scraggy little cow up the lane he always turned away his head. The place made him think of the old man who let the birds build nests in his whiskers. He preferred, instead, to look at the glories of Bald Mountain or one of the other hills. There was nothing wrong with the back drop in the home stage-set; it was only home itself that hurt one’s feelings.